


Tales From Quarantine

by lokilickedme



Category: Loki - Fandom, Original Work, Tom Hiddleston - Fandom
Genre: Anja - Freeform, COVID-19, Chem!Tom - Freeform, Chemical, F/M, Hammer of the Gods, Jack - Freeform, Jack Montague - Freeform, King - Freeform, Lockdown Sex, Loki - Freeform, Molly - Freeform, Sanguine - Freeform, Sgaile Leannan, Sunflower, The Department, quarantine has gone on longer than expected so I've slowed this down to one couple per month
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:01:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23380600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lokilickedme/pseuds/lokilickedme
Summary: What happens when fanfic characters get stuck in a universal lockdown?  What do grumpy Scottish kings and frustrated Chiefs of small town law enforcement and restless construction workers and easily irritated demigods in exile do when forced to stay at home with whoever coughed on them last?Guess we’re gonna find out.Chapter 1 - King and Molly from The McClary ChroniclesChapter 2 - Loki and Jack from Jack MontagueChapter 3 - Tom and Anja from ChemicalChapter 4 - The Weemeetwa PD from The Department (Greta and Chief + the guys)
Relationships: Adam/Selina/Eve, Chief/Greta, Jake/Tate, King/Molly, Loki/Jack, Tom/Anja, Tommy/Chloe
Comments: 147
Kudos: 104





	1. The McClarys

"Haven't you heard? Get home ye silly woman, the PM's issued a lockdown order."

"What??"

Molly looked up at the TV bolted to the wall in the corner. _Stay at home order now in effect for the following counties -_ Her eyes scanned the oddly spelled names until finally a familiar one scrolled across the bottom of the screen. _Claighe._

"Oh shit."

Where was King? He'd been up the hill when she'd left that morning, tending the sheep as usual. He'd mumbled something about fixing someone's fence later in the day. God, he could be at any of the farms scattered around Claighe. "Anybody seen my husband?" she asked loudly of the half empty pub as she fished her phone out of her bag and started dialing.

"I t'ot I saw him once, turned out it were just a raccoon in meh garbage bins."

"Shut up Dave." The phone dialed once and a familiar voice on the other end brought a sigh of relief as Molly frantically started rattling off questions: _Are you okay? Who are you with? You have to shelter in place, don't try to come home. I'm going to get your father the crazy man is up on the hill somewhere -_

Pod's deep drawling voice shushed her immediately. He had the same admirable skill his father had, the ability to cut through his mother's rambling tirades with just one slow word. "Ma, stop. I'm fine. I'm at my dorm and we've got everyt'in we need, the school was ready for this."

"Are you sure? Honey you can call your cousins, they live so far out in the woods maybe you could - "

"Is t'at Pod?" Dave leaned toward her, redfaced and glassy eyed. "Dylan mah boy," he yelled, "R'ember what I taught ye when 'ta zombies start comin', all ye gotta do is outrun the bastard next 'ta ye so get with a slow kid - "

Molly slapped him away and turned her back as he made a clumsy grab for the phone. "Honey please promise me you'll call your great aunt if you - "

"Mum, _stop_. Go find Da and get home. _Gaol agam ort."_

"God, yeah, okay. Love you too sweetie. Be careful."

Dave snorted loudly and made another unsuccessful grab for his mug as Glenda snatched it out of his hand. "Ahhh shite, King's gonna kill that woman b'fore ta weekend." He turned unsteadily on his barstool and half slumped across the bar. "Glennie I'm too peshed to go home, you got a room fer me up ta stairs?"

"Crawl home Dave MacDale, I don't care where you lock down but you're not doin' it here. Get!"

He turned to Molly as she was dialing again and gave her his best pleading face.

"Sorry buddy, you're on your own."

"King where are you?? The entire country's gone into mandatory lockdown, you need to come home."

The long silence on the other end made her hold the phone away from her face to see if the call had been disconnected. King was known to hang up on her with very little provocation, usually when she was being too loud for his nerves or too chaotic for his temperament on any given day. Speaking too fast. Speaking too much. Speaking at _all._ It never made her mad, but this was important. "Thomas Alastair James McClary don't you hang up on me!"

"I'm here, Mol."

"Oh." She paused, concentrating on lowering her voice a few notches and slowing down. She could see him in her head, probably wincing with a frown so deep it tilted his dark brows and made him cock his head to one side like a dog hearing a whistle coming from an indistinct place. "Sorry but you have to come home right now."

There was a long silence, then King's deep gravelly voice asked, almost too quietly to be heard over the wind howling in the background, "What's happened."

"The virus - you know, that thing that's been going around for months now? The coronavirus? Claighe is on mandatory lockdown, we all have to self quarantine."

Another long pause, then "Mol, have you forgotten I live like that already?"

"Yes but _I_ don't. I've been around people in town, I was just at the pub, oh - oh god - " Realization sank in and took her heart down with it. "Oh shit King, we need to stay separate."

"Okay."

"We need to - wait, what? You're okay with that??"

There was a deep sound on the other end of the line, soft and low, and she knew he was laughing at her. Goddamn that man. "Settle y'rself Mol. I fucked yer head inta the bedrails last night or have ye forgotten?"

Oh yeah...they'd definitely shared any germs they might have had between them. "Alright, yeah, okay you're right. So we need to shelter in together."

"Go to the cabin."

"What? Why the cabin? You come down to the house."

"Call Ella and Pod, see they're alright. Then get your arse to the cabin an' start makin me dinner."

"I already called Pod and I'm about to check on Ella and excuse me _what??"_

"Yeh heard me."

_Click._

Molly Elizabeth Thompkin McClary, Bhanrigh of Claighe, wife of the surly-ass king and mother of the absent prince, stood in the doorway of the little hut at the top of the sliabh and sighed. It wasn't a forlorn sound, though in the empty echo of the wood slat walls it definitely sounded a bit defeated. No, it was more of a _Here we go again_ type of sound, full of melancholy and wistful memory. The ghosts of this place were stubborn, not that she'd ever truly cared to try exorcizing them. The first time she'd set foot in this cabin had been at the start of a massive snowstorm that had put herself and the hostile sheepherder who owned it behind closed doors together for six days and changed both of their lives forever.

Well, hers anyway. Not much had really changed for King, he still roamed the hills just as wild and free as he ever had. He slept up here whenever it suited him, came down to spend a day or two with her at the house when it pleased him, and went about his business with the sheep and the local farms as he wished.

Except now he was a husband and a father, and there was a phone in the pocket of his kilt with his queen and his heir on quickdial. And it had all started right _here,_ in this tiny hovel with a bed the size of a camping cot and no electricity...and now they were about to be holed up together again, this time for longer. Fortunately they could move between the two houses.

But King wanted to be here.

She'd gotten pregnant at some point during that first lock-in. Pod. God, that boy. Away at university in Glasgow now. At least he was near his relatives, the Auchinlecks might be rowdy heathens but they took care of their own and Pod fit right in with the noisy lot of them. He had a place to go nearby if the school started sending people home. Ella was with her mother in Cornwall, as safe and secure as anyone could be at the moment.

Nothing to worry about. Just the end of the world as we know it...and there was no better place in the world for her to be than right here, on a remote hill in the highlands, with a man who could survive in seclusion for the rest of eternity if eternity called for it. But he'd chosen to spend this particular bit of seclusion with _her,_ and that felt remarkably like the little twinge of honor most people feel when a particularly standoffish pet suddenly decides to curl up on your lap.

He'd picked her over his beloved isolation.

That was something, even now.

King had requested dinner - if _request_ could be interpreted from his gruff demand. Molly felt a smile tickling. King didn't often make requests, he just showed up at roughly dinnertime and plonked his big self down at the table, usually half finished and ready to head back out the door before she even came out of the kitchen with the whiskey. But sometimes...well, often really, he would pull her into his lap as she passed his chair and settle her roughly on his knee to grab a grope under her sweater or slide a big hand up her thigh, and then the sheep and the pigs and whatever local farm needed whatever repairs done before sundown would be forgotten until he'd had his way with her.

Because of this little hut. She couldn't hate the place, even after all these years. She'd once entertained fantasies of it collapsing into a dusty heap during a particularly gusty bout of wind while King was out on the hill somewhere...but every time she trudged up the mountain to spend an afternoon with him or to tidy the old place while he worked, she found herself growing more and more fond of it until now she considered it something of a vacation retreat. Rustic, yes - primitive, absolutely. But so was King, and god how she loved that man. This cabin was part of him. He didn't invite her up here often, she certainly wasn't going to decline now.

She dropped her overnight bag on the table and started the long arduous process of unbuttoning her heavy coat. Dinner wasn't going to make itself, and there was going to be a hungry King kicking that creaky door open before long with something dead and in need of seasoning slung over his shoulder. Best get busy firing up the cranky old flametop stove and yanking something out of the garden to go with whatever he would be bringing in.

King McClary didn't like to wait.

**_::BANG::_ **

Molly jumped in spite of herself when the door flew open and King stepped in, standing to full height after ducking to enter without hitting his head on the top of the doorframe, making her suck in her breath a little bit at the sight of him. It had been eighteen years and he still made her choke nearly every time he made an entrance like that, all dirty and ragged and looking every bit like the half wild wraith she knew he was. He shrugged something off his shoulder and it hit the floor with a thud, then he raised his head and looked across the cabin at her.

Those earthy green eyes were maybe the only part of his face that wasn't dark with dirt, the muddy smudges across his forehead and cheekbones meeting his dark beard like Celtic warpaint.

If she'd been chilled by the cold up to that point, she was certainly feeling distinctly warm now. But this was Molly, and there was yapping to be done first.

"Good god King, what have you been doing, fighting off the British?" Her nature had always been to jump up and start scrubbing at his face with the hem of whatever she was wearing, pausing only long enough to decide whether the recipient of the spitwash was willing enough to allow it - and now was no exception. She pulled up the bottom of the towel that she'd wrapped around her waist as a makeshift apron and reached for his chin. King narrowed his eyes at her, but didn't move away when she started scrubbing. "If you're channeling one of your ancestors I hope to god it's not Thomas the third, please tell me you haven't been getting weird with the livestock."

King didn't say a word, but then he rarely ever did. He stood silently until she stopped, his eyes on her the whole time, and when she stepped back and frowned at him he grabbed her before she could formulate a protest.

That didn't stop her from catching up a moment later, though.

"No no _NO,_ you're filthy, stop! The world is going up in flames and you're covered in - what is this? - what - is this _pigshit??_ Oh for _fucks sake King!"_ She braced her hands against his chest and tried to hold him at arms' length, but he wasn't having it.

"Quiet woman."

"No I'm not going to be quiet, turn me loose right now and _what is that?!"_ He loosened his grip on her just enough for her to stumble back, staring in disgust at the thing he'd dropped by the door. "Is that a badger?!"

King turned to shrug out of his coat and Molly stopped mid rant, eyes going wide when she saw his shirtless chest and stomach covered in the same dark mud that was streaked across his face. He moved past her and left her standing there at the door, gaping in frustrated shock at either the state of him or of the animal on the floor. He wasn't sure which and he didn't much care. Frustrated shock seemed to be the goofy woman's default setting.

"T'was the one killin' chickens."

"Okay, good, you got him finally. But why do you look like that scene in Shawshank Redemption?"

King got the reference but didn't acknowledge it. He'd spent half the afternoon crawling on his belly through the underbrush stalking that damn beast and he was hungry. "Where's dinner?"

"You brought home a _badger,_ King. I'm not cooking a badger."

The big man grinned, waving toward the door as he headed for the warmth of the fireplace and started stripping out of his muddy leather work kilt and boots. "There's a chicken hangin' in the shed."

"I'm not getting it. You know I don't touch dead things. And you do know what's going on, right? I mean, you do _realize_ the freaking _Prime Minister_ has issued a mandatory lockdown, right?"

King sat down on his chair in front of the hearth and tugged off first one huge heavy boot, dropping it with a thud, and then the other before turning around to look at her with one eye squinted shut. "So?"

"So? _So??_ It means we're stuck on this mountain for the foreseeable future, King - as in no going anywhere, this is it, we're up here until someone tells us we can come down and Pod is in _Glasgow_ and - "

He was scowling so hard Molly felt like he had to be giving himself a fearsome headache. "Pod's fine, I dare any fuckin' zombie to try 'an take a bite outta him. Tough stringy bastard."

"What?! Zombie?? Who said anything about any fucking zombies?! And that's my son you're calling a stringy bastard!"

 _"Our_ son. And he is a stringy bastard. If there's a siege on the school they best just arm him an' get behind him."

Molly could feel that her mouth was open, knew it had been for quite some time now, but she couldn't bring herself to close it for some reason. And then she saw it. King had turned away from her to stoke the fire and when a shower of red sparks flew up toward his face, he tilted his head to one side to shield his eyes.

He was grinning.

That was when she realized he was also very naked.

Well, socks. He still had his socks on. Other than that he was just as God had made him, and there was no questioning God's choice in materials for this particular model of human were of superior quality. Or whatever King McClary was. The human part had always been highly debatable. She watched him reach into the fire barehanded to turn the log and sighed with absolute resignation when he clapped his hands together to shake the soot off them and stood to full height again.

It was always a little overwhelming, that part. The unfurling. He was the tallest human she'd ever seen, and the years had added a bit of bulk to his oversized frame that sat so damn well on him. So _so_ damn well. He'd been a bit on the slight side when she'd first met him, but nearly two decades of happily eating everything she baked in her neverending quest to win every damn ribbon the Womens Institute had to offer at the yearly village faire had packed a respectable amount of weight onto those sturdy bones of his. He'd always been easy on the eyes. Age had only made it that much easier.

The resignation in her sigh was absolutely about what she knew was coming next, and the simple fact that she knew she wasn't going to do a damn thing to resist it.

King was going to seduce her in that way that was so uniquely his.

"You gettin' mah supper yet?"

Yep, there it was.

"Nope."

He tilted his head but never broke eye contact. He'd gotten better at that over the years, to the point where sometimes he unnerved her when he refused to look away. Countless staredowns had ended very badly for her.

"Guess we're havin' the second option then."

"Which is - ?"

"Well I'm no eatin' the fucken badger."

Molly frowned in confusion. Second option? There was nothing to eat in the cabin except the chicken that was hanging in the shed. What the hell was he - 

His eyes dropped to somewhere around the buckle of her belt.

_Oh._

"You're filthy."

"If you're attached to that kit you best take it off now." He made a generalized gesture indicating her clothes, then turned his back to her again and knelt down in front of the fire to dunk a rag into the open kettle that was starting to steam above it. Molly immediately started stripping - she knew hesitation would only result in yet another shirt being torn and everything else being ruined by...whatever that stuff on him was.

She had maybe forty-five seconds before he finished scrubbing his face with that rag and came after her. The King of Claighe didn't operate on any discernible timeframe, but once he'd issued even the vaguest of warnings it was simply general knowledge from that point on that you had until he was finished doing whatever he was doing, and then your time was up.

The Queen had long since learned to respect the hell out of that particular timeframe. Too many shirts had lost buttons for her to ever discount it.

There are few things in the realm of human comprehension that defy definition to the point where no word, established or made up, can accurately describe them. One is the devastating cocktail of emotions a woman feels during that agonizing few seconds in between feeling her child slip from her body and hearing its first cry. Another is the heartbeat of a moment upon waking when a person can't discern dream from reality.

The third, for Molly at least, was the breathless second in between King's hands clutching her backside and feeling him slide into her.

It was ecstatic, electric, exhilarating, painful, blissful - a thousand things in one moment, one little fraction of time when _he_ and _she_ ceased being individual entities and became _they_. And it still never failed to knock the breath right out of her lungs.

And the pictures off the wall.

Coronawho?

King had long ago lost his aversion to kissing, though sometimes he did more biting than nuzzling and the roughness had never truly been gentled out of him. Molly had learned through sheer necessity that matching his intensity was easier than protesting his manhandling, but sometimes - like this time - she kept up without putting any real decision to it. Maybe it was the stress of weeks spent worrying about her son, her stepdaughter, her man...what would happen to them in the months to come if this thing didn't get under control soon? What about the world in general? She and King and the children could weather a lot up here on this hill, away from civilization...but for how long? If King was alone he could probably just revert to the wild and be the last man standing at the end of everything, but he wasn't alone anymore, he had her and Pod and Ella to worry about. She almost felt guilty about connecting her life to his and bringing this burden to his doorstep.

Maybe it was that. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was something else that had nothing to do with the end of the world. She didn't believe the end was coming anyway - humanity was far too wily for that, too smart, too clever and stubborn and brilliant to just go to its knees in front of something as primitive as a fucking germ.

No, it wasn't any of that. It was entirely the animal attraction that she and King had, had _always_ had, and it was driving them to tear into each other with all the urgency and abandon that they'd shared during that first week together while the blizzard roared around them.

The rickety little shack creaked and groaned as they pushed and moaned and rubbed and strained against each other, listening to their heavy labored breathing as it swayed worrisomely in the howling wind that whipped across the sliabh. The two bodies twisted together on the stone hearth housed souls that were exactly like the timber and rock that had kept the house from falling in on itself for more than a hundred years. Because they, like the house itself, were strong on their own...but damn near indestructible when put together.

Molly looked up sleepily at King; the hard floor under her back was uncomfortable as always, but she couldn't bring herself to care much about it. King was stretched out beside her, propped up on one elbow, one hand laying heavily across her bare stomach. He looked like he always did - ridiculously handsome, impressively rugged, dangerously unreadable, painfully fuckable...even with half the sliabh's dirt clinging to his skin. He had put her on her back and kept her there, thrusting hard until he was done, then let her push him over to take the top and ride him until she couldn't even gasp the single syllable of his name without choking on it. He dragged one big hand up her belly to her chest and cupped a palm over her breast while she watched his face.

He'd never cared much for being looked at, but somehow being looked at by this woman made him feel something other than irritated.

Something warm.

Something slightly electric.

Something undeniably _hard._

"You're slackin' woman."

Molly's eyes widened, those lovely china blue eyes that he'd always thought looked like they'd been picked from the patch of little blue flowers the sheep liked to eat, right there at the crest where he'd first stampeded them through her work site. The one pair of eyes he didn't mind being on him.

"Slacking? That was _slacking?_ I beg your parden your majesty but that was _not_ slacking. That was olympic level _masterpiece_ coitus superbus and if you don't think so then I don't know where you were for the last twenty minutes but it certainly wasn't _here_ \- "

He took the hand off her breast and clamped it over her mouth.

"Mah supper."

"Oh."

And then he was up on his knees and shifting down toward her legs, stopping to bury his face in that soft warm place between her thighs before lifting them to settle them over his shoulders. "I said there were but two options for eatin' and tha badger weren't one o' them."


	2. The Montagues - Loki and Jack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki, God of New York. Jack, Goddess of Loki's bedroom. The virus can't touch them, but in the interest of not blowing their longstanding cover as mortals who most definitely aren't, they've sequestered themselves away in their apartment like the rest of the world to wait out the pandemic in quarantine...until Jack can't stand it anymore. Assassins may not be essential personnel during this crisis, but a self appointed task force for scaring stray humans back into the safety of their homes sounds like a *real* damn good idea for getting some fresh air and exercise for a couple of bored misfits with built-in immunity.

"This sucks."

"It's not my fault you can't cloak yourself."

"Why can't you cloak me? Come on Loki, I'm losing my fuggin miiiiinnnnnd."

The God of Mischief, Lockdowns, and Utmost Boredom slapped at his head to shoo his obnoxious little wife away; she wouldn't stop playing with his hair and after twenty minutes of having his long black tendrils tied in knots and spitcurled he'd had quite enough of her noise. This was the longest her short attention span had ever kept her interested in something and it was getting up close and personal with his last nerve. "You know the rules, Jack. We have to blend with the humans if we're going to live among them."

"This isn't living, this is house arrest and we didn't even do anything this time." She gave the back of his hair a flick and ducked when he swung his newspaper at her head. "Who's gonna see us? Nobody is out there. Look! Street's empty."

Loki cast a disinterested glance toward the window she was gesticulating madly at. "What are you going to do out there? Everything is closed."

"I don't know. Something. Anything. Nothing."

"I'll play poker with you again."

"No thanks, you cheat."

The God of Lies and Cheating At Poker pointed at himself. _"God of Lies."_

"God of Bullshit." She slithered onto his lap, a bit awkwardly but that was just Jack, wasn't it? The day she did something sexy with grace would be the day he started checking IDs at the door. She laced her fingers into his hair and tugged his head forward to nip at his nose with her teeth. "We could...you know..." She gave her crotch a little grind on his knee to make her point clear.

"Fuck?"

The look that crossed her face would have made him laugh if he wasn't so damn sore from too much of that already. His dick might never recover from this goddamn lockdown. He wondered what sort of numbers the US census would be looking at in the population boom that was due to hit in just about eight months. Fortunately Jack couldn't do the motherhood thing, and wasn't that just lucky for him on the birth control front - his children tended to come out a little too unconventional to pass inspection and the dress-up holiday only came one day a year on this planet. She bounced in his lap, bringing a hard involuntary wince to his face.

He needed to get out as badly as she did, truth be told. And though sex was still one of his favorite pastimes, his creaky back was starting to protest the abuse.

"Alright," he sighed, pushing her over off his lap, sending her tumbling to the floor with a thump that was all elbows and knees and maybe a little bit of chin. "Get your coat."

"Now you're talkin' Daddy."

He yanked the front door to the flat open and swatted her hard on the ass as she bounded through it ahead of him.

"Don't fucking call me that."

The night was chilly and turned his breath to a foggy mist in front of his face that made him smile; he loved the cold, it brought back long repressed memories of his birth planet and made him feel connected to this place. New York wasn't Jotunheim, but its cooler months brought him a comfort that soothed his anxious soul and settled that eternal longing for _something_ that he'd never quite been able to quench. He turned his face up to the black sky.

This was close enough.

"This wasn't a bad idea, Jack."

"See? I been tellin' you but you never listen to me."

"Because you talk a lot of shit, my head auto-tunes it out."

She picked up a bottle and hurled it at his back, but Loki's reflexes, though definitely slowing with age and the disquieting effects of Midgard's heavy atmosphere, were still sharp enough for him to reach back over his own head and snatch the bottle out of the air before it made contact with his skull. He was turning around to make a tsk'ing noise at her when a voice cut into his plans for a public display of churlish magic.

"This guy botherin' you, lady?"

Loki and Jack both turned; they hadn't seen the human but there was he, standing against the front of the liquor store with a bottle of his own clutched in one hand. He wasn't inebriated but he had the distinct smell of hard liquor to him that gave away his own plans for the rest of the evening. Loki shook his head and raised a hand to point at him.

"You should be at home. There's a shelter order active."

"Naw." The man waved a dismissive hand toward Loki and took a swig from his bottle. "I'm bulletproof."

"Heh. You hear that honey? Dude's bulletproof. Should we test him to see if he's telling us the truth?" Jack strolled over and leaned against the wall next to the man. "I got a secret, you want to hear it?"

A rude sneer crept across the man's face and Loki felt his spine stiffen with a fury he knew would get the better of him unless this little game stopped right now before it got good and started. But Jack didn't plan on stopping, and wasn't that just like the crazy little bitch.

Odin's asshole, he loved that woman. He unclenched his fists and put his seidr on stand down.

"Ask her what her secret is. Go on."

The man looked from the tall dark godkind to the tiny blue-haired vampling suspiciously, then shrugged. He didn't know what either of them actually were other than a very mismatched looking pair of oddballs, but it was nighttime in New York and everybody had a right to their kinks. "Alright, what's the secret?"

Jack leaned toward him, pursing her lips to blow her breath seductively across his face. "I tested positive."

"What?"

"Not for this stuff. This corona shit, that's a case of the sniffles compared to what I got." She edged closer, drawing a possessive warning growl from Loki that made the man glance nervously over at him. She brought his attention back to herself with a loud fake sneeze aimed in the general vicinity of his head. "Whew that was a snotty one." She made a big show of wiping her hand on the front of his coat. "I got the venom sickness. You know what that is?"

"Um...no?"

"Oh this is a good story. Isn't it a good story babe?"

"It's a good story," Loki concurred, stepping back into a shadow. The man started to fidget nervously, shooting quick glances up and down the street. No onlookers...damn quarantine. A guy could get murdered out here and nobody would see it happen. The odd girl standing in front of him took a step forward again, putting herself uncomfortably in his personal space.

"I think we're supposed to be, um, social distancing - "

"We don't buy into that, do we babe."

"We don't buy into that."

"Besides, you're out here instead of at home, what do you care? Mister Bulletproof." She leaned in, close enough for him to feel her breath on his face. "I got bitten by a rabid vampire."

"A rabid - a what??"

"Vampire. You know - " She put two fingers up to her mouth to mimic fangs. "Real Nosferatu shit. One of 'em got me, you want to see the scar?" A quick tug on the hem of her shirt as she lifted it to show him the mark that had long since healed brought a feral sounding snarl from the shadow Loki had stepped into. He'd had his fill of the teasing.

"Okay enough of this, lets just kill him Jack."

The man's voice pitched up a notch. _"What?!"_

Jack dropped the hem of her shirt with a giggle. "You should go home."

"You're not the cops, you can't - "

A sinister sounding crack echoed from the darkness to his left and a voice, unnaturally amplified and punctuated with a terrible sort of threatening authority, bellowed _"GO HOME."_

Jack coughed in the man's face and he stumbled backward into the brick wall behind him. "Big daddy over there told you to go home, I know because I heard him. Hell I think they heard him all the way down to the panini shop. Hey babe can we get a panini after we kill this guy?"

The man stared at her. Crazy female, he couldn't tell if she was nuts or drunk or just _weird_ \- but he had to admit, he was starting to rethink this whole disregarding-quarantine thing. "Who the fuck do you think you are?"

"I think I'm Jack of the kinda-noble house of Montague, you mighta heard of us, we were big in Verona a few centuries back during the plague's first world tour." The blank look her narrative elicited brought an unconcerned shrug of her shoulders. "Yeah, didn't figure you for the literary type. Me neither to tell ya the truth. But I bet you've heard of my father. Dude that slaughtered all those gangsters in Detroit a couple years ago?"

Loki had moved over to the mouth of the alley and was checking the darkness between the buildings, scanning for witnesses. "This is New York, Jack. These people don't care about anything that happens past 82nd and Kline."

"Oh." Jack leaned in, eyeing the man with a disinterest turning rapidly to boredom. "Okay well, all I got left is me, and _this_ is who I am." She let loose a snarl, baring her fangs with a hiss that brought a whimpering gasp from her victim as he stumbled over his own feet in a quick reverse that put him against the brick wall again. "And tall dark and fuckable over there is Loki, God of Kicking Your Ass For Breaking Curfew. And, you know, Mischief and stuff."

"There's...there's no curfew."

 _"There is now."_ Loki turned quickly and strode toward the man, long black coat flying behind him, head lowered menacingly as he shoved his hands toward the ground to ignite emerald light in his fingertips that sparked and sizzled in the damp night air. The man's eyes went wide.

"Holy _shit_ you're _real_ \- "

Loki stopped less than a breath from the man's face and stared him dead in the eyes. _"I'm as real as it gets."_ Raising one hand, he held it under his own face to let the eerie green glow illuminate his features as he snapped his fingers, causing sparks to fly. He may have shifted his looks just a little, for effect.

The man bolted.

Jack picked up the bottle he dropped and chucked it after him, scoring a hit to the back of the left knee that sent him sprawling on the concrete. "That's right, go home, don't breathe on anybody. _And practice social distancing you dumbass!!"_ She turned on Loki, irritated. "And why did he know who _you_ are?"

"I've told you." Loki turned his face to the night sky, breathing the cool chill of early April deep into his lungs, enjoying the resumption of quiet now that the squawking human was gone. "I'm famous around these parts."

"I thought that was just with the ladies. Dude's a dude."

"I may have lost my bearings a bit, a few years back." His eyes scanned the dark sky quickly, his tense expression softening to something just almost - _almost_ \- like sentiment. "Well will you look at that."

Jack followed his gaze upward. The sky above the city had sparkly things in it.

"Holy shit, the stars are back."

"They are." He looked down at his companion, at her eternally childlike face staring with a gleeful sort of wonder up at the twinkling dots that so perfectly mimicked the fairy lights she had hung all over his apartment. The city was quiet - not silent, not by far, but much quieter than he'd ever heard it in all his years of living here now that the people who supplied most of its noise were sequestered safely in their homes - and as he pulled her to him to tuck her up under his arm, he knew that however much longer he had in this place, on this planet, serving out his exile among these beings whose obnoxiously endearing weaknesses he was beginning to feel in himself, it was all going to be alright. All of it. Not just the humans - they would survive this pestilence, they always did. They were wily and smart and resourceful and _tough_ as a species. They'd be okay in the end, one way or another.

And so would he. He had a lot of years left in him. This virus wasn't the first disaster he'd watched transpire in front of him and it wouldn't be the last.

"This was a good idea, Jack."

Jack looked up at him, her darkened eyes reflecting the sparkling lights of the stars. "Told ya."

"Yes, you did."

She ducked out from under his arm and tugged on his hand, pulling him along with her as she took off walking at a rapid clip toward the end of the street.

"Where are we going now?"

"I dunno." She turned and looked at him with an infectious excitement that he could feel working its way into him. "That's the best part, ain't it?"


	3. The Heyworths (Tom & Anja)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes you just need a little bit of nookie to make you feel better. Tom and Anja end up in quarantine without the kids, but with one of them sick and the other in the mood, being holed up together takes on a whole new kind of meaning.

"Who do you think will find us?"

"What?"

"Someone will have to, eventually. Unless the whole world goes down, then I guess it'll be aliens."

"What??"

"When they arrive all they're going to see is empty streets...everything looking abandoned...and then they'll start looking in the houses and find all these skeletons."

I sat up and stared at him. My love, my mate, my favorite weirdo. "What is wrong with you?"

Tom turned his head to look at me, those sparklingly supernatural turquoise eyes of his dancing with the sheer unfettered joy of tormenting me. "Skeletons everywhere, just all laying in bed, watching TV or fucking, waiting for the world to end while it slips quietly into that good night."

"Okay that's it." I scrambled off the bed - or _tried_ to scramble, at any rate. Moving much quicker than a crawl was a bit difficult when every move was making my chest seize up. When the coughing fit eased off I pushed Tom's hands off my shoulders and scooted, more slowly and carefully this time, toward the side of the bed. "That's not how that quote goes and it's time for you to go do something. Up. Go."

"That's exactly how it goes and I'd rather stay here."

"No it doesn't. And stop coddling me, I'm fine." A sad sort of softness clouded my heart when I turned back to look at him again, at that oddly beautiful face of his, still rosy cheeked with a health every bit as stubborn as he was while mine was streaked red with a fever that had been spiking and falling for days. "I wish you had gone with the girls."

Tom just shook his head and reached out to pull at the messy braid that had been keeping my hair out of my face for what was already feeling like months. He'd plaited it himself in an effort to keep me from chopping it all off on day nine of our quarantine. "They're fine with Pop and Kady. You know they're having a ball with Keiko."

I nodded. Tom already knew how much I missed the kids, I didn't feel any need to try to hide my melancholy from him. But I was still a little bit mad at him for not going when I'd told him to. I had come down with a cough and then a fever so quickly that we didn't even bother trying to go get Layla and Melody from their granddad's house - we knew what it was immediately, my symptoms followed the template too perfectly to waste time getting tested. The children would stay where they were, at Pop and Kady's house where they'd been spending the weekend, and I'd begged and pleaded and then finally demanded that Tom keep his distance from me, pack a bag, and skedaddle to Pop's himself.

But he wouldn't go.

And that scared the shit out of me, because his gimpy lungs were in bad enough shape without being attacked and weakened by the Covid. But as I'd stood there with my purse over my head in swinging position, threatening to smack him in the balls with it if he didn't back off from me, he had cupped his hands protectively over his vulnerable bits and ducked my swing with all the expert grace of a man accustomed to having things lobbed at his head. He'd grabbed me, and then he'd kissed me, and then he'd announced that it was too late, he was exposed, I was just going to have to live with the fact that we had to go into quarantine together now.

I was never going to forgive him for this.

I don't think he cared much about that, though.

"What do you think our skeletons will be doing when they're found?"

I tried to ignore him, but our little house was getting littler by the day, filled to the rafters with his larger than life self and my feeble attempts to get him to knock it off. We'd been having this conversation for days. Tom has always been the biggest thing in my immediate field of vision, both physically and metaphorically, and as the hours turned into days and the days started to look suspiciously like weeks, the topic of skeletons had dominated his moments of boredom with a morbid sort of amusement I'd always associated with him. The difficulty of his teenage years had ingrained a dark humor into him that the pandemic was only stoking into a roiling smoky fire, and I'd been refusing to engage as steadfastly as I could under the circumstances.

"Probably fucking."

He raised an eyebrow and looked at me, all cockeyed and cute laying there stretched out on the sofa. His legs were so long that his socked feet were hanging well off the end of it.

"I remember back when you thought that was a dirty word."

"It _is_ a dirty word. I've just been corrupted by your stubborn refusal to expand your vocabulary past second-string adjectives."

"Second string? _Second string."_ He thought about it for a minute, then shook his head with all the decisiveness of a man with the Urban Dictionary on his side. "Naw, fuck is a top-tier adjective. Nothing else puts just the right amount of dot on your exclamation point. Fuck is _prime_ vocabulary."

"It's a verb."

"Only when you're doing it. But then it becomes an expletive. Like I said - versatile. What other word can change its vocabularic designation based on the context it's used in?"

"Everything in the French language."

"We're not French. And isn't it weird how people scream it while they're doing it? What other situation would you do that in?"

"What?"

"Nobody drives down the street screaming DRIVE!! DRIVE!! OH MY GOD _DRIIIIIVE!!_ Or walks around in the grocery store moaning 'Ohhhh shopping, _shoppppiinnnng - "_

I stared at him, trying to keep a straight face. "You've always been the stupidest person I've ever known."

"Says the girl who can't tie her shoes."

That was below the belt and I stood up in a huff, intending to stomp out of the room in my own particular brand of faux outrage - but my head was swimmy with the lingering fever and I hadn't eaten much, and my huff devolved quickly into a swoon that ended with me taking a header for the floor. Tom reached out to grab me and strategically guided my fall directly into his lap.

He always was uncannily talented that way. Everything in his life had tilted sideways at some point, and every time he managed to make it settle obediently onto his knees like an adoring subservient. It would have been mildly infuriating in this case if I wasn't so distracted by my own fritzing immune system.

"Don't, I don't feel like it," I warned him as his hands worked in a quick, skillful grope. "I might puke on you."

Tom shifted me closer to his body and reached up to rub the frowny bit between my eyes. "Remember when you were nine weeks pregnant with Melody?"

Oh god. I'd never been so sick in my life and never had I _ever_ wanted to die so badly. "Don't talk about that, it's forbidden knowledge."

"You threw up while we were doing it doggy style - "

"Shut up! I said it's forbidden!"

"And did my boner flag for even a second?"

I sighed. He wasn't going to stop, it was a pointless and futile endeavor on my part to put even minimal effort into it. "No it got bigger because you're a _freak."_

"That's right, but what does it say about you?"

"It says I gave it an honest effort but screwing with you is too much like trying to walk across the deck of a rowboat during a monsoon wearing stilettos." I slapped his hands away from my boobs and crossed my arms over my chest to hold him off with my elbows while he set about sniffing me. "You need to go outside and get some air that isn't filled with my sick confused pheromones."

"And let the wind carry your plague germs to the neighbors. They'll love that." He succeeded in lowering my arms without much real effort and ducked his head to take a bite at my neck. "They already want us to move out. Now keep squirming, I love it when you struggle."

"That is _your fault entirely_ \- if you didn't teach your daughters to be irredeemable reprobates like you we wouldn't have the housing authority sending us warnings signed by everybody on the damn block. _And_ the next block over. We don't even live there and they made a petition!"

He sat back with an indignant expression but didn't loosen his grip on my neck, which was oddly arousing as always, even in my current condition. "Hey I had nothing to do with that incident with the wolf piss, that was all Cara and I didn't raise her." A strange look crossed his face. "I'm not sure that boyfriend of hers is fully human."

"Yeah well neither are you. Don't judge him too harshly."

"What the hell kind of name is Aleks?"

"Leave him alone."

He stared into nothing for a minute and I just stared at him, staring at nothing. The idea of him as a father was odd enough on its own merit...the idea of him as a father to a grown daughter who was old enough to be in a relationship was a step beyond too weird for comprehension. Tom wasn't meant to live past fifteen, he'd said so himself. But here he was, thirty-five and not even glancing back to see if fate was catching up yet.

There was something unbearably sexy about a man that life itself had failed to kill. And the Covid sure as hell wasn't about to do the job.

I was apparently protected under that inexplicable shield he had around him by proxy, because it wasn't doing a very efficient job of finishing me either. I'd had worse in my second trimester with Layla, though admittedly the simple knowledge that hyperemesis was rarely fatal was going a long way toward pushing the virus to the front of the _this shit is bad_ category. The meningitis a few years back had been an almost insurmountable roadblock to the whole staying alive thing, but I'd slept through most of that and didn't have an awful lot of recall on the details, and recovery had been fairly straightforward once I relearned a few things. So as far as sheer discomfort and the lurking presence of odds and national averages working against me, my current situation was pretty much the worst I'd ever found myself stuck in.

Stuck, in several variations of the word.

Tom gave the back of my neck a slightly less than gentle squeeze and I swear to god, if I hadn't already had a fever that was making my chest sweat I probably would have pinked up real nice and embarrassing. He was looking at me with his head tipped to one side, all that long gorgeous black hair falling over the lower half of his face so that only his eyes were showing, and before he even leaned forward to heft me up and carry me back to the bedroom I knew I wasn't going to put up anything remotely like a struggle.

Unless he wanted me to.

I looped my arms around his neck and held on. Thomas Adam Heyworth, tall handsome man, bartender, pub proprietor, father of three, mate of one - I didn't care anymore about the fever or the rattly chest or the body aches, because the sexy beast currently hauling me off to bed was about to do what he did best, and that was to make it all okay somehow. And he was good at it. So good that when he laid me down on the freshly changed sheets I sort of unfurled like a cat waking up from a nap, stretching and groaning while he tugged my pajama pants down and put his mouth to the inside of my left thigh, sucking a nice deep purple bruise into my skin to mark me where only he and I could see it. And then he spread my legs with his hands, and I barely had my eyes closed before his tongue started its lurid assault.

God.

It was like dying and being resurrected before your skin can even begin to go cold, only to be killed again and then yanked back before you can get close enough to the light to go through it. Except my heart was still beating, fast and hard and worrisomely erratic - though to be fair that could have been the Covid-induced tachycardia - but as his big strong hands slid up under my shirt and his fingertips found my nipples, my heart rate quickly became the last thing on my mind.

All I cared about was _that tongue,_ licking and caressing and sliding warmly over the most nerve-sensitive part of me, followed swiftly by the soft suction of his lips pressing to the same finely tuned little spot. I could feel my back arching and forgot about the body aches that had kept me curled into a miserable ball for days on end. There was something healing in the way he kissed me, down there, his face buried between my legs and his hair splaying out across my thighs and across my lower stomach. It was good and terrifying and soothing all at once, just like it always had been, but as my belly clenched up against the unbearable pleasure of it I realized that my body had become used to the pain of being sick - and _this,_ this felt new and electric and frighteningly like a cleansing, a purging, a casting off of the last two weeks that left nothing but me and him in our purest untouched, uncompromised forms.

Or maybe that was just the orgasm he was dragging me toward.

I reached down and grabbed his head, pushing his face harder against me until I felt him pulling against my grip. I was so close already, riding perilously on the wobbly edge...and then he disengaged, abruptly.

_"What are you - why are - noooo don't do that - "_

I couldn't get a single request completed but they all came together to make a jumbled sort of sense, mainly along the lines of frustrated protest at having that delicious intense stimulation suddenly halted. I knew what he was doing. And he was good at it, so the prospect shouldn't have felt as devastating as it did.

But devastating it was, and I nearly cried when I realized he was taking full control of my pleasure.

I wasn't in the mood to be edged. He could - and had, many times - keep me right at the brink for the better part of an entire night when he wanted to, but this wasn't the time for riding the rising crest of an orgasm for hours while he played with me endlessly. I wanted, no I _needed_ something earthshattering and fast, a hard reboot that I could roll over and recover from afterward, panting and trembling and weak from the sheer intensity of it and not from the soul ravaging effects of some stupid virus that had burrowed its way into my unsuspecting immune system.

I needed havoc, but not that kind. I needed a crashing tsunami taking out a coastal city, not wave after wave ebbing and breaking on a warm sandy beach.

After a minute I realized Tom had stopped doing anything at all.

"Wha - what are you - ?"

I looked down the length of my body straight into his eyes. He was just staring at me, his chin resting on my pubic bone, that sweet but slightly sinister grin firmly in place on the mouth that had just a moment ago been buried tongue-deep in my vagina.

"You were whimpering."

"Ugh. God." I covered my face with my hands. "I don't know if I can handle where this is going."

"No?"

"No."

"Okay, baby." The bed shifted and I felt him move over me, his long body pressing down against me, supported by his knees and elbows as he dipped his head next to mine to nuzzle into the side of my neck. I didn't know how to tell him I didn't want this either. After all this time together I knew he would give me anything I wanted, but I also knew sometimes I had to ask for it...and watching him grin with smug amusement while I stumbled over my words was something else I wasn't quite up for yet.

Having him on top of me wasn't a bad option...I could live with it...but when he lowered himself onto me I instantly felt claustrophobic and hot, the warmth of his body amping up the perpetual fever that just kept hanging on so that my first reaction was to push against his chest in protest. He circled his long arms around me and locked them behind my back, effectively stilling me to the point where I couldn't wriggle under him anymore.

And then he flipped us, rolling over onto his back and taking me with him, still locked inside the cage of his arms and now laying sprawled out on top of him.

"Get up there, Girly."

Before it had a chance to sink into my slightly addled head that I was now in the top spot where it was _much_ cooler, he was pushing me up into a sitting position and tugging my shirt off over my head, freeing my breasts to be sucked on as he sat up to do just that while I sighed happily at the sudden change in my skin temperature. His mouth found my nipples quickly and that little fire that had been sparking in my gut started to flame up with a heat that rivaled the worst of my fevers. But this was a _good_ heat, the kind that rages without destruction, the kind you can step back from to keep from being burned but still get warm clear through to your bones. The kind that doesn't fry brain cells.

He laid back and pushed me by my shoulders until I was sitting completely up on his hips, staring up at me with an entirely different kind of heat smoldering dangerously in those turquoise eyes of his. He murmured something to me, but I couldn't tell you what it was if I had to. I just know that it made me groan, and then my hands couldn't work fast enough to get his pajamas tugged down without some help from him.

Once I had him free I reached down between us and held his heavy, hard cock upright, sliding down on it until it was nearly completely inside me. I didn't even need any further foreplay to get me wet enough to take him; he gasped when he slipped in, biting his lip hard, then reached up and put his hands over my breasts and started rubbing my nipples with his thumbs while I eased myself up and back down on him. It took three tries before I could get him all in, but once I had him sunk to the hilt I leaned forward to support myself with my hands on his chest. His own hands never left my breasts, thumbs stroking endlessly back and forth across my nipples, rushing me toward that quick intense climax I'd been so hungry for while I pumped him quickly in and out of me with my hips.

It was good. _God_ it was good. It always was, always had been, but something about my head being so hot on the inside and it competing with the heat in my belly just made it that much more intense, more spinecracking, more _le petite mort deluxe_ \- and by the time I fell gasping and panting on his chest, no more than a minute or two had passed since he'd first rolled over onto his back.

I'd have been embarrassed if I wasn't so ridiculously sated. And boneless...completely, limply boneless. But the fire had finally burned itself out and now all that was left was the softly glowing embers that marked where the inferno had raged.

Twenty minutes, maybe a half hour later, neither of us had moved much other than the gradually slowing heaving of our chests and the slow tickle of his fingertips up and down my spine. I'd sweated so much my hair was sticking to his chest and the side of my face, and there was a growing puddle of come and slick juices dripping its way out of me onto his thigh, but none of it felt icky like it normally would. This time it just felt like proof of life, and for the first time since I'd started coughing twelve days ago I knew, actually _knew_ that I was going to pull through. It had been touch and go a few times early on. But now, listening to Tom's heavy thudding heartbeat under my cheek, I felt completely alive again.

There's nothing like a planet-pounding orgasm to reaffirm your existence in the mortal plane.

"So who do you think will find us?"

I'd dozed a little, I wasn't sure for how long. Tom was staring up at the ceiling with an intensely thoughtful look on his face. "Hopefully not Ewan...knowing him he'd be the one to survive this whole thing though. The aliens are gonna love him. This is who we get to represent us as a species, Ewan fucking MacDonough, last human standing."

"Are we having this discussion again?"

He shifted a little and a cool breeze rushed between us, sending a chill through me that felt like wind from heaven. It had been so long since I'd felt anything but hot. "If we went right now we'd be like that pair of skeletons they found in Turkey, all wrapped around each other, solid evidence of the universal prerequisite of one final fuck before the end comes."

I grunted and moved a little, hoping for another of those arctic breezes to hit me somewhere around the general vicinity of where we were still sort of connected. Tom had long since gone soft and had slipped all but completely out of me, but we were still slotted up tight against each other and there was something the disconcerting consistency of half dried Elmer's glue cementing my leg to his.

"Well I don't know about you but I'm not going to die of this crap and Ewan is not going to find me bare assed with petrified jizz all over me."

Tom eyed me for a second, that sly little grin starting to twitch up at one corner of his mouth. "Good to hear, 'cause I kinda thought you were a goner there for a while. Don't slip quietly into that good- "

_"That isn't how it goes!!"_

I turned my head to look up at him, digging my chin into his ribs a little harder than was strictly necessary. The Tom Heyworth bubble of protection and ridiculously good luck was firmly around me, I could feel it. Always had. It was a cockeyed sort of luck, the kind that kicks in when it looks like the only way left to go is down, but luck is luck and I wasn't about to begrudge it its contrary nature. It had saved me twice now, I couldn't afford to be a nonbeliever.

He laughed softly, long fingers stroking up and down my shoulder. We both fell silent and I think I dozed again almost immediately; as the air conditioner kicked on and blew its angel kiss of cool manufactured air across my bare back I heard him, his chin gently bumping the top of my head as he whispered -

_"Old age should burn and rave at close of day;_  
_Rage, rage against the dying of the light.  
_ _Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,_  
_And learn, too late, they grieve it on its way,_  
_Do not go gentle into that good night."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Manip of Chem!Tom by @vivianstark for the fic "Chemical"
> 
> Excerpt from "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas


	4. The Weemeetwa PD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Take six rough-edged small town guys, add one rough-edged big city girl, throw in a case of Corona - NOT the beer kind - and shake them all up under one roof with lockdown orders and only one sofa and what do you get? This. You get this.

"Don't breathe on me."

"I'm not breathing on you."

"Stop, I can feel your breath. It's coming over to my side." I waved a hand toward him to blow his cooties back to his side of the car. "Cut it out!"

Bobby Creeley yanked his mask down and opened his mouth, leaning across the console between our seats to invade my personal space with his gigantic shaggy head. "If I wanted to breathe on you I'd just do this." He sucked in a loud exaggerated mouthful of air and puffed his cheeks out like he was about to blow it at me.

I jerked away from him so hard I hit my head on the window, which, true to his nature, he found ridiculously humorous. He tugged his mask back into place and settled back into his seat with a smirk I could see without even looking at him. The sabertooth tiger fangs on his mask suited him, the jackass. Big vicious dumb animal. Too bad he wasn't extinct too. The radio crackled and I reached for it, grateful for the distraction from what was about to become a dissertation on all my partner's undesirable qualities.

"Unit Two here."

_"Morley. Over."_

"Yep, that's me."

There was a long pause and I knew Kevin was sitting there at the station staring into oblivion, waiting for the correct response from my end - but god help me if I knew what it was or if I would give it to him if I did know. Cree snorted and started drawing a dick on the foggy window with his finger. "Kev's skipped a groove again."

"Dude did way too many drugs in the sixties." I thought about it for a minute. "Was he even born yet in the sixties?" Cree shrugged again and I put the receiver to my mouth and pushed the useless relay button purely out of spite and habit. "Dispatch this is Unit Two."

_"Morley."_

"Yes Kevin, this is Morley."

_"You're supposed to say 'over'."_

I sighed. Not a lot had changed since the day I'd walked into the station and marched into Chief's office, full of myself and ready to throw a coup that he had no intention of entertaining. Cree still harassed me, Cade still found everything hilarious at a high school locker room level, Sarah still disapproved of the simple fact that I was alive. Andy still got attacked by Hobo every morning, like his brain reset every night and by clock-in time the next day he'd forgotten there was a hellhound living in the station bathroom. Red still rampaged in medieval Martian, Ted still made pretty darn good donuts, Wilson still bent the law to breaking every time a stupid idea for a crime entered his head or he got bored. The stilted radio conversations between me and Kevin were a completely random yet annoyingly frequent occurrence pretty much every damn day and it didn't look like that would be changing any time soon. Saint was still...Saint.

And Chief.

Chief was still the best thing that ever happened to me.

I put the receiver back to my mouth again and took a deep breath while Cree mocked me from the passenger seat. _"Over."_

_"See that's not hard."_

"Kevin tell me what you called me for or I'm hanging up." Long pause. Cree stared at me expectantly while I gritted my teeth and finally growled, _"Over."_

_"Chief says get back to the station. Over."_

"Roger that, we'll be circling back as soon as we check on Mrs Henderson." I lowered the receiver and Cree reached over to smack me on the shoulder.

"Say over."

"Goddammit. _Over."_

_"No he says come back right now. The Mayor made an announcement. Over."_

"How the hell did anyone understand him? He might have been summoning Cthulu in Finnish or whatever. Over."

_"He's Norwegian. Over."_

"Like I said, whatever." I waited a tic to torture him, then yelled "Over!!" right before I hung up. I looked over at Creeley. He raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms over his chest. "Chief says get back to the station."

"Yeah."

"Sounds urgent."

"Does, doesn't it?"

We both stared straight ahead for a minute, out the windshield at the snow that was starting to fall again, threatening to dump itself on us in unfathomable amounts from a slate grey sky at any moment.

"Guess we should get back to the station then."

"Guess so."

"Should we...you know...?"

Cree grinned again, and this time it wasn't the smarmy grin of a mean-natured pervert having wicked thoughts. This time it was pure gleeful approval, and he reached for the half-harness shoulder belt and had it clicked into place before I'd even downshifted to put the car into a flat spin to get us going back in the direction we'd come from. No sense in doing anything halfassed, not with this kind of machinery under our asses.

"I didn't make this car for shits and giggles Morley, I made it for goin' fast and lookin' good."

"Well I'm about to do the going fast part, looks like it falls to you to take care of the looking good bit."

He leaned back with a wide smile that crinkled his eyes up above his mask. "Got it covered."

Chief hit the speaker button and held his phone up over his head. The cranky old doc from up the street yelled at us through the speaker, setting my spine on edge so hard my teeth gritted reflexively. Being ass-up on a stranger's kitchen table while significantly paralyzed is something you don't get over in a single lifetime and just the sound of his voice was giving me flashbacks to Creeley carrying me out of the building like a barely consensual wedding night in progress.

_"Okay folks, your tests are back and you're positive. You're under active quarantine for the next fourteen days so get settled."_

We all looked at each other, awkwardly reminiscent of a room full of murder suspects trying to figure out whodunnit and hoping to god it wasn't us. "Wait... _who's_ positive?"

_"All of you. Every last damn one. I don't want to know what you reprobates get up to over there but I've told your neighbor to put a quarantine sign on the door and boot all your vehicles. Nobody goes anywhere."_

"We can't go to our houses?"

_"No ma'am, the majority of you are asymptomatic and I don't trust someone not to sneak out. Lookin' at you Bobby Creeley. We can't afford to spread this, we're isolated here and ain't nobody gonna come help us. I trust you've all seen The Thing?"_

Cade popped open his Thermos and said what we were all thinking. "It looks like Andy is the only one with active symptoms. He's over here snuffling like his head is a snot balloon."

_"Oh, yeah no - Andy was actually the only negative in the bunch. He's just got a cold. But he's exposed, so he's got to stay there too. Odds are good he's an antibody carrier and won't get sick but he could still spread it. So settle in kiddos, I'll be checking in every few days."_

"Figures. Goddamn Irish." Cree snorted and grabbed the Thermos cup, lobbing it across the room at Andy hard enough to take a head clean off somebody's shoulders. "Dipshit." Andy ducked and it hit the wall behind him, rolling back to the middle of the room slowly while we all stared at it. After a moment of silence, I cleared my throat.

"I would like to take this opportunity to make it known that I hate each and every last one of you so much right now. I told you this was going to happen as soon as Cree came in complaining about it being hot and you all blamed it on some whack ass seasonal shift."

"Hey now, the Sub-Spring Doubleback is a real thing - "

"It's still minus four hundred and twelve degrees out there Creeley!!"

"Get used to it babydoll, Red kicked off the winter power ration this morning and it's about to get all kinds of Brokeback Mountain up in here once that thermostat lock clicks in. Might have to do a communal sleep pit out here in the middle of the room, ever'body pile up to share body warmth."

"Geezus you have got to be kidding me."

Chief finally spoke up, the voice of clearheaded authority breaking through the chaos as always. "Okay people lets just calm down and get this sorted. Kevin, call Steve and have him drop off some bedding and whatever else you can think of outside the door and get together a list of what everybody needs picked up from their places. Andy, go get Hobo and tie him up out front and call Wilson to come get him, then get the gas heaters from the shed. Cade, I want you to start a contact trace, figure out who everybody in here has been in contact with for the last forty-eight hours. Greta, my office." He turned and walked off, leaving me standing there with the entirety of the Weegotcovidbecausewestupid PD staring at me with the sort of slackjawed disgust usually reserved for perps who got caught doing weird things with livestock. I shot them all a nasty look.

"What??"

Creeley snorted and kicked the Thermos cup, pinging it off Cade's desk and ricocheting it across the front bars of the holding cell. "Goddamn teacher's favorite. That office is the warmest spot in the whole fuckin' building."

"And he's got a sofa."

Everybody looked at Andy.

"What? I'm just sayin'. And it folds out into a bed."

"We should get to take turns."

"With Greta? Dude - "

"In the office, dumbass. Like flip a coin or somethin'."

"Yeah because democracy."

"No, because _sofa."_

The last thing I heard before I shut the office door behind me was Hobo lighting into Andy and Cade braying like a hyena. It was going to be a _very_ long two weeks, but if I played my cards right the communal sleep pit would be minus two warm bodies...and I wasn't even contemplating murder.

Yet.

"You wanted to see me, Chief?"

He looked up when I shut the door behind me, those hot blue eyes of his taking the chill right off me. We were operating on an unfinished bit of business from that morning - a shared shower had gone from an equal opportunity soaping to a quick run out the door when a call came in, and even being stuck in a vehicle with Bobby Creeley for the last four hours hadn't managed to dampen the ardor the Chief had stirred up in me before we were so unceremoniously dragged apart by duty. But we were alone now, sort of, in his office with the hotly contested sofa.

"I would very much like to see you, yes."

I took a step toward his desk. "It's a bit too nippy to get naked so I'm afraid what you're looking at is what you get."

There they went, those incredible eyes, up and down slowly from somewhere around my hips to just about my shoulders and back again before finally settling on my face. He broke into a devious sort of little grin as he sat back and tossed his phone onto the desk. "Sarah called. She doesn't miss us and she's not sorry she's not here."

"She's the only smart one we've got, hightailing it back to - " I waved my hands around, trying to remember the name of the town she'd mentioned on her way out a week ago. " - back to wherever. I do question her timing though, putting in for vacation right before a frigging pandemic hits. It's almost like she knew this was coming."

Chief nodded like he didn't disagree with me, though I couldn't be sure if it was on her knowing this was coming or on her being the only smart person in the entire department. But he was doing that slow up and down on me again with his eyes, and for once nobody was listening at the door or trying to see in through the slatted shades on the window. They were too busy placing bets and handing money back and forth while Hobo chased Andy around the lobby.

"Come here, Morley." Chief pushed his chair back from the desk and patted his knee. "Got a warm spot ready for you over here."

"Naw, I think you should come to me." I glanced back over my shoulder at the sofa that up till just a few minutes ago I didn't know opened into a bed. "I've been hearing rumors that you've got a foldout in here."

He looked down at his lap, brows knitted in faux confusion. "I've never heard it referred to that way before, but okay."

I don't know why Chief resorting to trucker-level smarm made me feel slightly feverish, but it did, and I was. "You spend way too much time with Saint."

"I share DNA with him, what can I say."

"Huh. Maybe you should come over here and share some with me."

He winced a little at my cringey attempt at seduction, shaking his head and obviously trying not to laugh while simultaneously biting his tongue. He wasn't the only one guilty of spending too much time in the company of lowbrow associates, though in my defense I had no choice in whose butt warmed the passenger seat of my squad car on any given day. All of my options were of the lowest-common-denominator variety. But at this particular moment Chief had his eyes leveled on me, and god knows that barnburner stare of his was more than enough to make me forget all about Cree wiping his nose on my hat that morning. I strolled over to the comfortably worn out sofa and sat down primly on the arm, leaning over to pat one of the cushions while shooting my lover a halfassed attempt at a come-hither look. Seduction was never my best game, but god help me it could never be claimed I was guilty of not trying.

And bless the Chief, he fell for it every time - whether he was honestly attracted or simply humoring me to keep me doing it, I would probably never know because the man's poker face was _impeccable._ He narrowed his eyes like he was thinking about it, then sort of shrugged and stood up behind his desk to take his coat off.

"We got time."

I watched while he hung the coat neatly on the back of his chair, then stared in confusion as he pulled his mask up over his mouth and nose before he stepped around the desk and headed for me, pointing at my face.

"Mask up."

"What?"

"Your mask. Up. You've been in a car with Cree all morning and he's sick."

"According to Doc we're all sick."

"Yeah but he's _actively_ sick and you've been sharing air with him. Mask up or you sleep out in the pit. Somebody in this group has to stay lucid and if I can arrange it it's gonna be me."

"Aren't you the noble one."

"You want to be solely responsible for keeping Andy alive for the next fourteen days?"

"Nope."

"Then mask up." He stopped just about six feet away and waited with his hands on his hips until I complied, begrudgingly.

"I don't see what good it's gonna do," I grumbled while he watched me snap my bandana into place. "I read it's transmissible through semen."

He gave me a wink, and I'm angry as hell that I'm forced to admit he was somehow even sexier with half his face covered by his black neck gaiter and those ridiculously bright blue eyes the only thing visible above it. I won't own up to a bandit kink but if Chief had tried to hold up my train wearing that thing I'd have handed over the payroll without a single unnecessary act of bravery. "There's a mask for that too," he said, tapping his pocket as he closed the socially distanced gap between us.

I suppose the reality of two people fucking during a global pandemic is less desperately glamorous than it sounds on the surface...but Chief unbuttoned my three layers of flannel shirts while I unbuttoned his, and as his big warm hands were sliding up under the final layer comprised of my tee shirt and I set to work on the fly of his jeans, we somehow met in the middle with the sort of frantic, hushed, hurried excitement usually reserved for teenagers trying to get in a grope while the girl's dad is in the bathroom. The fact that everyone we worked with - minus one - was on the other side of the wide glass partition window above our heads made the whole thing somehow more thrilling in a shaky _oh shit don't make any noise_ kind of way, and once we had our shirts open enough to get skin to skin with each other it sort of just carried itself. Chief set about kissing me through his mask, pressing his covered face against my stomach first and working his way up, his hot breath seeming somehow more heated and damp as it filtered through the fabric to burn into my chilled flesh. The thought crossed my mind briefly that every purpose that mask was meant to serve was being negated by this simple action, but at the time it didn't really seem to matter all that much. Chief's germs didn't scare me. And when he nuzzled against the side of my neck and then raised his head to look at me and all I could see was those eyes staring down at me with the kind of look a girl only gets to see maybe once in her life, I knew one thing for goddamn sure.

I could fall in love with this man.

Easily.

 _So_ damn easily.

But first things first, and Chief's inordinately thick and shockingly heavy cock was nudging up between my legs with just enough urgency to trigger the instant-open reflex in my thighs, and before I had much time to think about that whole _falling in love_ thing I had my knees up and he was tugging my panties down around them. My jeans were yanked to my ankles where my boots refused to let them go any further, but we couldn't be bothered with that for now. And then his broad calloused hands slid up between my finally naked thighs, and then he fitted his hips in where his hands had been, and then some ill-advised switch behind my eyes flipped into the on position and that was it - I was gone. But it was the good kind of gone, the kind that filters out everything except what you're there for, and with no effort at all Andy's voice and Cade's laughter and the dog's barking all faded into a low background hum that might as well have been a cozy crackling fireplace.

Sex hormones are a hell of a drug.

I came perilously close to sucking my entire mask down my throat when Chief pushed inside and the groan that rumbled in his chest sent whatever was left of my common sense in a southward trajectory with no hope of ever coming back.

"Holy _fuck."_

I don't know which one of us said it, but it didn't matter. Nothing did, not the prospect of being stuck in enforced lockdown with six males who had approximately a teaspoon of good manners between them, not the sordid reality of being held prisoner for two weeks watching Andy and Kevin pass their one shared brain cell back and forth, not even the cursed hell of sharing space with Bobby Creeley for the next fourteen mornings, noons, and nights. All told, it was a goddamn bitch of a bad situation all the way around. But at least the dog was somewhere else.

But none of that mattered right that moment while Chief pushed his hips against me, seating himself as deep inside me as he could get under the circumstances. And then he started to thrust, and that little bit of me that suffered the most as the shaft of his cock rubbed against it started to tense and quiver with the sharp shock of arousal that comes with Tab B fitting securely into Slot A. He looked down at me, still moving on top of me, and I could see the smile in his eyes even though the rest of his face was swathed in black.

This was...

 _Good_.

His weight on me was all I wanted, was all I could see myself wanting for the foreseeable future, the crush of his body pushing against mine and the pulsing heat of his skin warming me from the inside. I hadn't known this man long enough to know his favorite color yet, but I knew his heart and his soul and his nature just from the times when our bodies spoke to each other like this. Words passed between us that never made it to our mouths, and in those quiet moments when the raspy sound of our breathing and the strained creak of whatever held our weight were the only sounds to hit our ears, it was in those blissfully blank yet somehow full to overflowing moments that I knew this man, this man making fevered love to me on a slightly worn but not terribly uncomfortable office sofa - this man was _something_. Something more than just my boss, something more than just my lover.

This man was going to allow me to save myself, somehow. Because I didn't need a man to do my saving, I never had. My ex husband had done a piss poor job of it and Hawk hadn't even tried, but long before either of them ever entered my life I knew that wasn't a role I needed a man to fill. My life was _mine,_ and if it was going to go to shit I was going to own responsibility for it all the way down. And if I was going to breach the flames and claw my way back up from hell, that was going to be on me too.

All me. All of it.

Chief knew I didn't need him for much of anything except a sign-off on my transfer papers at the end of my exile, and he looked at me with the calm comfortable aura of a man with one less problem on his handle-it list. There was gratitude in his smile that told me he was enjoying the ongoing comedy of watching me flail hopelessly through it all, knowing that he didn't have to lift a finger unless I asked him to. He respected my struggle and was content to be on standby, ready if I needed him, unobtrusive if I didn't.

I'd never realized just how much I wanted that in a man before.

I sure as hell did now, though.

"Report in, Officer Morley."

My eyes snapped open and there he was, my handsome blue eyed Chief, the one person in the world who could convince me to stay in Jack Frost's ballsack without ever even asking me to. Which was weird, because if someone had asked me to pinpoint the exact moment, or even a general timeframe when my attitude toward Weemeet- fuck, whatever the damn place was called - when my attitude toward being _here_ had changed from seething hatred to begrudging half-like, I couldn't have even made a halfassed guess. It had happened insidiously, creeping up on me with the silent stealth of Kevin suddenly appearing in a doorway like he'd been there all along.

Chief nuzzled his cloth-covered mouth against my cheek and I heard the strained labor of his lungs trying to keep up with the effort of taking us both beyond our current selves. He was doing all the work while I laid there, blissed out and stuck inside my own head, my ass squeaking against the worn leather cushions. It took two hard swallows and one throat-clearing, but I finally managed to put enough words together to respond to his request.

"Reporting in, Sir."

His fingers tightened their grip on the back of my neck, but there was no anger or even annoyance in the squeeze despite my somewhat snide use of his least favorite word...and something about that gentle pressure snatched me up and set me back down right at the brink of the finish line, where Chief caught up to me just seconds later.

"Who do you think's going to be the first to show symptoms?"

"You mean besides Andy?"

"Andy's just got a cold, you heard the doc."

Chief laughed a little, but it was obviously meant to be to himself. "It's not a cold. Andy's patient zero, he's the reason everyone else got it. He's sick as a dog. Probably got infected by some traveler passing through on a one-nighter." He stretched an arm out and flicked the light switch off. "Goofy kid is like a one-man welcome committee for everybody that goes through here."

"But - the doctor said - "

"Think about it, Greta. Every positive test goes into a national databank with a name and a location for the stats tally. You think we can have 'Andy Burns, Weemeetwa Minnesota' popping up in accessible government records?"

Huh. I hadn't considered that. "So that old doctor knows about him?"

"Of course he does."

"So...everybody in this place is sick? Geezus, what are the odds of that."

"Actually not everybody."

I stared at him for a second, piecing together what he was saying. My brain was taking its time firing back up after the total shutdown of orgasmic power outage I'd just gasped my way through. "No? Who's not got it? It better not be Creeley because I swear to _god_ if he doesn't suffer like the rest of us I'm gonna give up believing in a higher power."

He winked at me over the top of his mask and it suddenly clicked into place - it was _him._ Chief was the only one of us that wasn't infected. And he was here, in the big flaming middle of the equivalent of an infectious disease ward, doing his job regardless. The rigid devotion to the mask made sense now. I reached up and tapped his covered nose. "You could have gotten out, why'd you stay?"

"You think I'd leave you to fend for yourself with this crew? Besides, someone has to be here to look after patient zero when everybody starts to drop like flies. And I'm exposed, so there's that."

"But you're negative."

"Yep."

"Have you been tested for antibodies?"

"Maybe."

"And?"

He settled down further into the well worn yet horrifically squeaky cushions, tugging me toward him with the arm that was crooked around my neck, and pressed a well protected kiss to my forehead.

"Does it matter?"

He closed his eyes, and if I knew anything about this man it was that once he settled in for a post-coitus nap, he meant it and you'd best respect it. I stared at him for a few more long seconds, then decided to just assume his silence confirmed the affirmative and let it drop. Chief wasn't the easiest man I'd ever known, but he was far from the most difficult, and for that I considered myself lucky. I snuggled up under his arm and tried to keep myself from laughing at the ludicrous situation I'd once again found myself in...yet another in a long line that didn't look like it would be ending in my lifetime. "Look at you, all immune like a superhero."

He didn't say anything. His breathing was already slowing to the drowsy cadence of sleep, completely unperturbed by the loud argument coming at us through the window above our heads.

_"You coughed on me you dumb shitbird."_

_"Stop looking at me or I'll do it again."_

_"Department protocol prohibits the malicious transference of potentially deadly pathogens - "_

_"Shut the fuck up Kevin."_

_"Guys we have a problem."_

_"What now, numbnuts."_

_"The key to the bathroom was on Hobo's collar."_

_"So go get it."_

_"Wilson already took him, he said he was gonna take him to his dad's hunting cabin for the weekend."_

_"You tellin' me we got no shitter till that fuckbrain comes back on Monday?"_

_"You're operating on the assumption that he won't meet his demise in a stupid hunting accident before then. This is Wilson we're talking about. That key is gone."_

There was a long pause, then the reassuring sound of Creeley kicking the bathroom door off its hinges with a resounding crash that likely meant there wasn't enough of it left to put back. I nudged up closer to Chief, forcing him to scoot toward the edge of the sofa to make room for me. The leather cushions squeaked out a symphony of just about the rudest sounds I could hope to ever hear outside of what was now happening on the other side of the office door.

"There's worse places I could be."

He jumped a little, yanked back from the brink of completely-gone by the sound of my voice. "What?"

I sighed, weirdly content with my current situation and not the least bit worried about any of it.

Huh. Imagine that.

"Nothing...go back to sleep."


End file.
